One recent SciFoo related post that caught my eye was Mario Pineda-Krch’s thoughts on the idea of distributed open notebook science. Yes, distributed.
As Mario mentions, by using a client based wiki setup like Tiddlywiki, the user has more flexibility by not having to rely on network access. Furthermore, a version control system like Git brings redundancy allowing anyone to download the latest version of the notebook. The wiki + the data with full control.
The idea of open notebook science is not necessarily a new one. The term was coined by JC Bradley roughly two years ago. However, it’s been tough to go mainstream due to the fact that notebooks are usually foreseen to be private, thus failing in the “open” department. However, this hasn’t stopped many from setting up lab notebooks online like Jean-Claude Bradley, Garrett Lisi or any of the dozens of OpenWetWare lab notebook users.
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Tags: Git, Jean-Claude Bradley, Lab notebook, Mario Pineda-Krch, Notebook, OA, open access, openwetware, SciFoo, Tiddlywiki, Wiki
Posted by Ricardo Vidal
Ricardo Vidal is a graduate student in Biological Engineering at University of Algarve (Portugal) and is also currently the Community Developer at OpenWetWare.
He also maintains a personal blog called My Biotech Life.
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October 26, 2008 at 12:20 am
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August 14, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Jean-Claude Bradley
It was very encouraging to hear about more interest in ONS at the conference. It will be interesting to see reports on what works and what doesn’t in different contexts.
In my lab different people may want to modify the common lab notebook close to the same time so locking a version for editing would not work. But Wikispaces does allow a space export as HTML that one could use to access the data if one is cut off from the internet.
August 15, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Bill Flanagan
Interesting.
Are you using Wikispaces in your lab?